Mr. Bernard Gloster:

Our portal is fostering.ie. Relative carers are a connection to where fostering originated in the Brehon law period. It arose from the concept of a village raising a child. Relative carers make up about 20% of our approved carers. I hope that research or a study can be done on what the outcomes look like. It is important. People have a perception of an adversarial relationship between Tusla and a family. In our modern-day approach to practice, there are about 5,800 people in our care, with about 16,000 open cases of children at home in our child protection system. Social workers visit those children, engage with those families and work well to support the parents to keep the children safe. We have a good national approach to practice, using safety plans. In safety plans, we bring relatives in to be part of the ongoing support system of the child. We hope that, should that child require a carer for a period, we will rely on the relative. It is important that we emphasise that. It is not an adversarial thing with the State going to take a child off a family and the family being cut out of the child's life. In our experience, most children in care eventually determine the level of contact and engagement they want. Relatives have a significant part to play in that.